Advances in digital video camera technology have resulted in high quality cameras with lower cost and greater image resolution. This has permitted facility owners to deploy an increasing number of cameras that must be monitored by a fixed size security staff. Critical to making the existing staff as productive as possible is to provide additional information on which cameras have the most important information. When an event of interest occurs within a facility or compound, providing a mechanism to select the cameras with a field of view that contains the event of interest is a significant capability. This requires cameras to be aware of their direction in relationship to the compound or facility and elevation angle.
Although requiring the camera installer to note the camera direction and angle could be entered into a database and used to automatically point a camera to an event of interest, maintaining such information in large camera systems is difficult and expensive requiring additional labor. Furthermore, cameras are frequently moved or added incrementally causing the information to be incorrect or non-existent. Cameras that have pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) capability can be repositioned to view an event of interest but must be positioned relative to how they are initially mounted. This lack of spatial reference with respect to the rest of the facility or compound and increases the work load for the security staff.
The embodiments disclosed herein therefore directly address the shortcomings of known camera networks by providing a system and method for automatically determining the camera field of view of a camera network.